h2>Dating : Do You Really Need to Learn Game to Get Girls?
Everywhere you go, everything you do, and everyone you meet is testing you.
- Your boss tests you to see how you respond to what he wants and needs.
- Your teammates in your sports league test you to see how good you are, and where you fall in the social hierarchy.
- Your friends test you to see how cool you are, and how much of their respect you deserve.
- Your employees test you to see how well you’ll take care of them, how much you know about what you’re doing, and to what degree they can get away with things.
- Your children, when you have them, test you to find out where the limits are, how well you’re listening to them, and how able they are to use you to get the things they themselves cannot get.
And women test you, to see how attractive you really are, how strong you really are, and how secure you really are.
These tests never go away — not from anybody — although they do die down as a relationship matures.
However, if you start showing new behavior, or signs of weakness, or failing to do something you used to do, those tests move right back to the fore again.
Likewise, YOU are constantly testing everyone and everything around you… and just like all the people who are testing you, you’re probably not even aware you’re doing it.
Is this because you, everyone around you, and everybody else scattered across this globe are silly, bad people?
Or is something else going on?
If you knew everything there was to know, there’d be no point in your reading of this article… you’d already know everything I was going to say.
Yet, here you are, so clearly you and I know different things.
There are some things I know that you do not, and there are some things you know that I do not.
Chief among these, perhaps, is what we ourselves are like; what our behavior patterns are; our predilections are; how we behave in calm situations, and in high stress / high stakes / high pressure ones.
If we are the types of people who do what we say, or the opposite of what we say.
How much we lie, and how much we tell the truth.
How changeable we are — reliable now, but unreliable a year from now.
What our past is like — and whether we’re hiding some (or much) of it.
These things are NOT things that you can know by asking someone. Because most of the time, he or she will tell you what you want to hear, or give you an autopilot response. And you will frequently be unable to discern lies from truth from unthinking standard responses. You will assume you have the truth — know you have the truth — right up until the moment you find out you had it wrong.
And the only way for anyone to know more about you than what you yourself want to let on, or that you yourself are even consciously aware of?
One word: tests.
When I first started working retail as a teen, I noticed something really bizarre.
A lot of my coworkers would stand around and not do anything most of the time.
If I asked them to help me with something I was doing — some extra cleanup work, or organizing things better — I’d get told they were “busy”, or I’d hear “that’s not my job.”
My ambition and initiative quickly caught the eyes of my superiors, and I would quickly wind up in a management position, while those people who started before me would still be in the same place they were when I arrived.
And when, as a manager, I’d ask them to do some extra cleanup or organizational work, I’d again often be told they were busy, or that was not their job.
Regardless of whether they were my colleagues or my direct reports, these attitudes always really got to me. Not always because I needed their help — often I didn’t, although sometimes we would have customers on the hook and they’d just be standing around, maddeningly — but often because I looked at them, and saw that they could be leading better lives, with more opportunity, more freedom, more happiness, more personal fulfillment… and instead they just stood around like rabbits, sipping at cups of coffee, staring off into space, listening to music, and telling anyone who asked them to get to work that that was not their job.
Whenever I hear anyone throw his hands up and refuse to make himself attractive to women and learn game to properly interact with women, all I hear is “that’s not my job.”
And really — truthfully — from a purely technical standpoint, it isn’t.
You don’t have to learn game.
You don’t have to learn how to talk with and interact with women and deal with tests.
You don’t have to learn how to be attractive, or charming, or sexually exciting.
You can just stand there and stare off into space and sip at cups of coffee.
But I sure don’t want to hear about it when you come to me complaining that you don’t have what you want in life.
Thing about these people is, they always do complain. They’re always trapped in victim mentality, and they want everyone around them to know how unfair it is how everybody treats them.
They are victims because the world does not want to bend to them.
Poor, poor them.
And the world itself? It just keeps on turning. It doesn’t notice their self-imposed plight — nor does it care. And why should it (or we)? They don’t care about bending to the world… so why would the world bother to bend to them?
You must give to get.
Yet, the people who have the least interest in learning how to accommodate others are always so upset that others have so little interest in accommodating them.
This seems to be a common misconception I see.
All this “game” stuff is just for picking up girls in bars and nightclubs, right?
Isn’t it just for party girls?
Real girls don’t need game, do they? You can just go be yourself and they will love you for it!
The term “game” probably doesn’t help anyway. Why should you learn “game” when you don’t want to PLAY games?
Only, much of what you learn game to do is NOT playing games.
In Hollywood, it’s only those horrible sleazy women our nice guy protagonist never should’ve dated or married in the first place that need “game”… because they’re fake and inauthentic.
They’re social ladder climbers, and just generally bad, dishonest people whose ideas about the world are all screwed up.
But then — just in our hero’s moment of desperation — then comes the nice GIRL! And unlike those terrible “game” girls, the nice girl does not require game at all. In fact, she chases after our kind-hearted protagonist herself, loving him just the way he is, in all his vanilla-flavored Everyman glory.
I have a female friend who does this, actually. She’s beautiful, intelligent, successful in her career, full of life and energy, and is in many ways a child of innocence, purity, and joie de vivre. Her boyfriends are usually star-struck to get her; she told me that her most recent boyfriend — an unspectacular-looking college professor with his own successful company and a highly religious background with very limited dating experience — glows with pride over having her as his girlfriend, telling her that she’s the most beautiful woman he’s ever dated and that it’s like he’s dating a model or an actress. He moved slow with her, and it took him 5 or 6 months to take her to bed.
He has no idea his princess has a long history of sleeping with lots and lots of men, was sleeping with lots and lots of men while they were going on platonic dates, and has a history of growing rather bored of nice guys with good careers like him after a few months and breaking up with them to be free again… or sometimes having a little something extra on the side to spice things up.
She’s hinting marriage with him, and my guess is he’ll go for this too.
My friend is not a bad person. She’s a good person. She really cares about people and likes helping people. But she’s not stable or long-term monogamous in relationships — she loves sex, loves being single, and loves hooking up with lots of different men. Her boyfriends usually do not know this, though, and probably would not believe it if you told it to them.
She is also a fair template for the kinds of women you do not need game with:
- Women who are in full control with you,
- Are vastly more experienced than you, and
- Who are not especially emotionally attached to you
Probing and testing is a security-seeking behavior from women who are not in control, when you ARE.
Interestingly enough, this “zero game” template woman very often is the kind of woman that “rescues” those nice guys in Hollywood films. They frequently don’t show you the girl’s background or dating history, but personality-wise, she’s a match.
Women who are this way behave almost exactly like those women in film do: they’re impulsive, they handle the approaching, they’re the ones pushing things forward, they don’t test the guy much, they open the guy’s eyes up and make him see the world in ways he never did before. And the guy is the one who’s soft, needy, and emotionally attached. And he doesn’t need to learn game to get her; he can just be himself, and she’ll find him.
Of course, Hollywood always ends the movie once they get together, and doesn’t show you the girl tiring of the guy after 3 or 4 months and dumping him for something more interesting or exciting, or having discrete affairs on the side to quell her thirst for novelty and adventure while her loving boyfriend/husband plods on in ignorance, blissful to have finally met a woman he needs no game with. I’ve seen a lot of these women, and I’ve slept with a lot of these women, and I’ve been contacted by some of the disbelieving and disillusioned boyfriends and husbands afterward. It’s a very consistent trend.
But aside from not showing the progression of the relationship, maybe Hollywood isn’t too far off the mark after all.
There are women you don’t need to learn game for…
… but they’re probably not the kind of women you’re fantasizing they are.
Ever see an attractive older married couple that clearly still has a strong relationship together?
The woman keeps herself looking good, and has a youthfulness about her that’s uncommon in older women. The man has an impressive air about himself, also youthful, and one of power and dominance and a bit of humor.
Across the board, you’ll notice the woman ball-busting the husband. She’s testing him; she’s still playing the game, even though it’s 30 years later.
As for him, he responds to her busting his stones with deft maneuvers; sometimes responding with self-deprecating humor, and other times lobbing a good-natured parry right back her way.
The game goes on. She continues to test him. Those are the tests and games you see in evidence. There are also the tests that go on behind closed doors — the relationship trials and tribulations that inevitably arise, when the couple falls on hard times, or the wife starts feeling bored, or the husband starts acting distant. Drama arises — and then, he deals with it.
He passes the test.
Because somewhere along the way in this game of life, this man figured out how.
He may have learned from a mentor or friend, or, more likely, he figured it out on his own, as some men do, because he’s high on empathy and knows how to tap into what it is women want, what they’re feeling, and what they’re really after with him when they start putting pressure on him one way or another.
And here’s the thing with “game” and “tests”: the more a woman WANTS you, LIKES you, and NEEDS you, the more heavily she will test you.
The more dedicatedly she will make you run the gamut.
But why? If she likes you, shouldn’t she not test you?
Isn’t not testing you the nice thing to do?
What if you don’t have game?
Here’s the clincher: what I’m calling “game” — this thing you need to pass “tests” — is really most often just YOU, YOURSELF, fully maximized to be an attractive, powerful, masculine, dominant man.
And once you have learned game — once you know how to respond to tests — and once you are fully self-contained as the kind of man whom others respect, admire, or even bow down to… at that point, you don’t even really notice when a woman is testing you.
You don’t think about “game.”
You are beyond it; you just do what must be done instinctively, and your woman (and anyone else who sees fit to probe you) is relieved: you are a powerful man.
And that is what women are looking for when they test you. They are asking you: “Are you REALLY the man I think you are? Before I continue to trust you, to commit to you, to throw my lot in with you any further — are you REALLY as strong and powerful and masculine as I need you to be?”
How you respond is how you set women at ease that yes, you really are what you say you are… or how you freak them out and unnerve them by showing them that there is something very much amiss in their perception of you, and that your words are not congruent with your behavior.
If you never take the time to learn game — and if you’re not the sort who will naturally figure it out on your own — you will forever live a life of unhappy squabbles and disappointed women.
That is the damnation reserved for the man who refuses to empathize with women, to learn what they want, and to take pains to become it: he must necessarily always be what women do not want.
And really, would you want it any other way? Would you want for yourself a woman who did not care if she was with a man who was going to waste her time, be weak, and give her weak offspring? Would you want her to be with you because it was not special, and she was willing to settle for anyone?
The problem that most of these men who balk at game and decry women for testing is that they’re idealists — they think that women should just know how awesome they are without having to test or probe. Women should just trust them.
And then they get upset when women do the things (testing and probing) necessary for those women to arrive at a place where they can feel confident that their men are what they hope they are and what those men say they are, and they can relax and trust them.
It is, like what we talked about in “Are Social Grace, Savvy, and Empathy Unmanly?”, just another form of entitlement on the man’s part, and frankly I think it’s quite weak and un-masculine. They should just get what they want to get, and not have to satisfy the other party’s needs for that party to give it to them… they think.
Here you have people who want something, who are upset that they don’t have it, yet who are unwilling to do what they need to do to get it, and who sit around and moan about why the world (or women, in this case) just won’t give it to them. Yech.
This is idealism — it’s a form of a flawed mental model — and there are few vices more annoying than this.
Personally, I think the penance for victimized idealism ought to be that all victim mentality idealists get locked up in a small room together and made to complain to one another how cruel and unfair the world is until they wise up and start telling each other to knock it off.
… is simple.
All you need is an open mind.
Not this closed mind of the victim-idealist. Not the mind that says, “I want what I want from people and I don’t want to have to do what other people want me to do to get it from them!”
That’s a child’s mindset.
If you have an open mind, you can walk out and start talking to women, and paying attention to what results your efforts generate, and changing and calibrating and testing to see what works, and you will learn game.
That’s what “game” is. It’s just learning how to be an attractive man who gives women what they want and need — what they really want and need.
And a big part of that is just being aware that women are always going to test you, and you must know how to deal with these tests.
Once you’ve learned this, it becomes automatic, and it’s no longer difficult, or confusing, or challenging. In fact, it even becomes fun. You enjoy women testing you, because you know how to respond in such a way that your woman will be delighted by your reply.
You can sit there and say it’s not fair that people who build nice, expensive things want a lot of money for those things… or you can go learn how to make money and afford to purchase those things you want.
You can sit there and say it’s not fair that men respect only strong, confident, self-reliant men… or you can go become a strong, confident, self-reliant man, and get respected by other men.
You can sit there and say it’s not fair that women test and probe to find out if you are still as strong as they hoped you were before… or you can go learn game and learn how to deal with these tests so you never have to worry about it again, and your women are always happy and smiling and thrilled to be with you.
The world’s a really dark, difficult place for those dim, closed-minded souls determined not to change to give to those they want things from the things those others want. They are forever chasing after wisps they can never have, because they refuse to be or give what is required. They want only to take what they want, and give what they want; other people’s wants and needs not considered.
But for those bright, shining souls whose minds are open to the learning of whatever must be learned to attain that which they desire to attain, the world is a place of inspiring, limitless choice, bounded only by the drive of the individual to learn how to do what must be done and the will to become what must be become.
I know which one I want to be.
I hope you do too.
Let’s leave the sidelines for the spectators, and get out there and play the “game.”
